I slept so deeply yesterday that when I woke up this morning, I didn’t know where I was for a couple of minutes. I embrace this because it means I’m pushing myself beyond my comfort zone. I quickly eat breakfast, take a shower, and quickly head out for another, exciting day at DBC.

Once I arrived, the director called in for a meeting to announce exciting that was internally happening with the company. The director told us that Kaplan was going to buy Dev Bootcamp; you can read more about it here. A lot of the students’ opinions during the discussion seem to be more negative than positive. However, the director and teachers kept stating that Dev Bootcamp would won’t change, and Kaplan bought Dev Bootcamp because Kaplan wanted to understand the holacracy system that is very successful and core to Dev Bootcamp’s views. In my opinion, I don’t think the cohort that I am currently in would be affected in any way; if future cohorts would be affected because of the buyout, I think it would take at least a year to start seeing changes within Dev Bootcamp. It was fun discussing the possible changes that would happen because of this, but I was more intent on spending my precious time coding the living daylights out of the challenges.

After the discussion, it was time for another peer session. My partner and I worked on nested arrays. For example, we would have to create a chess board with the chess pieces, or an already played board of tic-tac-toe. These challenges immediately reminded me of my favorite movie, Inception. In the movie, the characters go in a dream within a dream within a dream. Similarly, as my partner and I were creating the chess board with the pieces at the appropriate places, we had to create an array within an array.

However, our peer session was cut short because of the “Engineering Empathy” curriculum. The topics covered for today were:

• Empathy
• Life as a minority in tech
• Sexism
• Leadership in daily life

In addition to these topics, a handout was given out of the picture on the left. Whoever created these slides had no idea where the fine line is between humor and insult in my opinion. I would like to know what you all think about this.

For lunch, I headed over to Tres Carnes. In my opinon, it tasted like a very healthy version of Chipotle. What’s even more funny is that there was actually a Chipotle right across the street!

Since Wednesdays are solo optional days, I decided to solve challenges by myself for the rest of the day. I think that although it’s awesome to have peer sessions, it’s also good to have a day to yourself and really test yourself to see what you know and don’t know. The topics I did for the challenges covered data structures: primitive vs composite vs abstract. In addition, the common types of data I learned today were stack, queue, linked list, and set.

One thing I love about DBC is the small talks I have with the instructors and cohort friends in between brakes from the challenges. In addition to learning data types, an instructor shared his lifelong, learning journey. He shared how he hated his Chemistry class, so he brought his laptop to play video games during the class. He shared how he literally failed out of college because he got accepted to DBC 3 days before finals. He shared how he loved DBC so much that he put all of his trust into DBC; he was scared of that decision at that time because of the gamble he took on DBC. I sat in awe, listening to his story and relating to how similar his decisions were to mine in terms of DBC.

Listening to other peoples’ stories with an open mind is one of the reasons why I chose DBC over any other school; DBC creates an environment where students are able to take their “social mask” off and be true to themselves and to others. I believe the main chunk of our tuition money is paying for the relationships students form during my time at DBC. I think that besides the obvious goal of me trying to be a developer, I feel that I am also subtly learning from other peoples’ life stories as well.

I hope that I can become someone that is brave and strong enough to take the initiative and give back to the wonderful, DBC community. I hope that I will be able to contribute to other people’s learning as well.